What Are Those Kids Doing With That Enormous Gun?
In the summer of 2013 my friend Maura lost her iPhone in the Hamptons. (Maura asked me not to use her last name because of the sensitive nature of this story.) She was partying at a decidedly retrograde bar in Montauk—The Memory Motel. Locally, it’s known as one vertex of the “Bermuda Triangle,” a trio of bars where sobriety and personal dignity tend to go missing under murky circumstances. (The Memory Motel in particular is also famous for inspiring The Rolling Stones’ worst song.)
As Maura left the bar around closing time that Saturday night, she realized her phone had gone missing. She talked to bouncers and bartenders who professed ignorance, then had a friend call her phone, which went directly to voicemail. She’d gone out that night with the battery fully charged, which suggested that someone had found the phone and turned it off. When Maura got to her computer later that night, she went to her iCloud account and selected Find My iPhone. Since the phone was off, she wasn’t able to bring up a GPS-generated map of its location. But she checked the “notify me when found” box so she’d receive an email when her phone connected to the Internet again. She also put the phone in “Lost Mode,” which meant her phone display would flash a number where she could be reached so a sympathetic party could get in touch to return it.
Sunday passed without any further information and Maura returned to Manhattan. But on Monday morning, she received a message from Find My iPhone. The device had been located: It was currently in Harlem, at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Towers, a housing project several blocks north of Central Park. She had no idea how her phone had made the 120-mile trek from Montauk to Manhattan, but she had a surreal vision of it traveling on its own, facing the same choices any yuppie would face: Do you catch a ride in someone’s car? Take the LIE? Or is it faster to hop on the Long Island Rail Road?
As soon as she received the email that Monday morning, Maura called her iPhone from her work phone. It rang once and then immediately went to voicemail. When she tried a second time, the phone was off again. She didn’t quite have a plan, she told me. If the GPS map had shown a more precise location—an exact apartment instead of a pin in the middle of a housing project—she would have asked the police to check it out. But since she had no idea who actually had the phone, she thought she might just call that person up
